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Concept

Device Posture

The state of a device at the time of access: OS patch level, disk encryption status, EDR presence, jailbreak detection, certificate enrollment. Posture is an input to Zero Trust access decisions.

Posture is the signal that turns "who are you" into "should this device be here", and it is the part of zero trust that most often stays unimplemented because it requires an agent or MDM enrollment on every endpoint. The honest limit is that posture is self-reported by software on a machine the attacker may already control, so it is a strong signal against commodity attacks and a weak one against a determined intruder holding the device.

See also: what is zero trust, conditional access, ZTNA, zero trust vendors

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